Exclusive: UTV Interactive, the digital arm of the UTV Group has given Techtree, CXO Today and ChannelTimes, the three properties it acquired when it bought IT Nation, to Trivone Digital Services, a digital content services company launched by L Subramanyanan, who was once the CEO of Chandamama, and was once the editor of Dataquest. The possibility of a buyout by Trivone was reported by George D’Souza earlier today, but we’ve confirmed from both UTV Interactive and Subramanyanan that it isn’t a buyout, but a management contract. UTV Interactive is retaining the ownership of the brands, but Trivone will do the sales, and manage the sites under a revenue share arrangement, Subramanyanan told MediaNama.

“It’s a long term contract,” Subramanyanan added, saying that there will be a revamp, a change in focus in terms of audiences and content for the three properties. He believes that the upside with the three portals is very high, since they have been under leveraged.

Trivone has 14 people right now, three of them in sales (two in India and one in the US), while the UTV Interactive team has around 30 people dedicated to these portals. With the entire management of the portal is moving to Trivone, what happens to them? We’re awaiting a response from UTV Interactive on this; Subramanyanan says that they will be making offers to some employees from UTV.

47 Comments

MINDTREE & UTV blamed each other.... result loss for UTV .... MINDTREE has done good job but the problem is with one team(who were not interested in learning new technology... grey haired team wants legacy technology.. so that their task will become easy..). and one more point is UTV wants to maintain the project with less number of techie team(i.e.never identified value of techie team).Finally for UTV websites has become rocket science......before i wanna conclude i wanna blame the person who signed this media project (with high end technologies where finding techies on that is costlier)with MINDTREE. Paying the person without knowledge always results such loss. Finally I also appreciate MINDTREE professionalism. confidence and ability shown by the guys who has assigned to this project is more than they expected. PLEASE don't blame the techie guys.... Hope UTV will get success after this contract.

Ok. The news from the camp is everyone at Techtree has been asked to resign. Put their papers. The parent company claims they will re-hire some of them back. haha ofcourse at lower salaries. A major cleanup exercise is on the way. They are not gonna pay you 3 months sal. Since you are quitting on your own accord. Its gonna be a long fight. DRAW YOUR SWORDS. UP IN ARMS. I would personally blame the big guy of UTV himself but we are all allowed to make "mistakes" right? some more costlier than others. HEHEHE

UTV gets easily sold on a sales pitch. That is why all its CEO's and top management failed. The powers that be at UTV do not understand technology or media or both and hire people based on powerpoint presentations. Make a nice sales pitch and UTV will get sucked right in. Take any of the managers as an example.

i know who u r. just to protect ur identity i wont name u here. If it was not a sales problem was it a editorial problem? have u forgotten mr Ra ONE [name concealed to protect the innocent ;)] our CTO. When the editorial team wanted to do anything he was like this GREAT WALL OF CHINA. EVERYTHING ACCORDING TO HIM was a challenge. Want to add a simple xhtml to the website? aap katar mein hain krupya thodi der ke baad sampark karen. Want a website re-design? hey thats taboo... u cant do that.. its not possible. Couldnt even implement wordpress and spent insane amounts on the CMS. Yes we all know that debacle. That money could have been spent on the labs in a better way for techtree. What about those stupid decisions? So stop blaming the editorial people.

If you knew enough about editorial you would say that the tech tree staff was a bunch of morons who couldn't write. They were mostly a bunch of kids who were given responsibility too early in their lives with no training in writing or journalism. They probably understood a bit of tech and that's where it ended. Explains why visitors used to spend less than a minute on techtree.
Technology and limitations of the ITN CMS was legacy. The CEOs at ITN thought running good websites was rocket science and had monkeys who masqueraded as CTOs/tech experts. But then the CEOs themselves were no better. BTW, if they had sacked the entire techtree review team and had spent money on some better quality techies, maybe techtree would have been better off

since we are playing sach ka saamna over here, i think it was govind bolo hari gopal bolo who signed the dotted line for the CMS after which MA scrapped the project. Mindtree ne UTV ko full yeda banaya

Its not Mindtree who foooled UTV. Mindtree have developed CMS and guys who have been assigned to take a call on EXECUTATION level from UTV side had not shown confidence and ability to Fallow the MINDTREE Path.. MIndtree is one on the TOP most IT consulting company whn it comes to CMS.
They have done their JOB professionally but UTV MGMT delayed their payments and shown little will power to procede further. MA aftre joinning UTV had his own agenda and scrapped MIndtree CMS and gave contract to HIS known PPL & company.. and the story goes on.....
Its all politics and goofups at MGMT level..

MINDTREE & UTV blamed each other.... result loss for UTV .... MINDTREE has done good job but the problem is with one team(who were not interested in learning new technology... grey haired team wants legacy technology.. so that their task will become easy..). and one more point is UTV wants to maintain the project with less number of techie team(i.e.never identified value of techie team).Finally for UTV websites has become rocket science......before i wanna conclude i wanna blame the person who signed this media project (with high end technologies where finding techies on that is costlier)with MINDTREE. Paying the person without knowledge always results such loss. Finally I also appreciate MINDTREE professionalism. confidence and ability shown by the guys who has assigned to this project is more than they expected. PLEASE don't blame the techie guys.... Hope UTV will get success after this contract.

hey hey so the BLAME game is started here too. Any one please tell me how these so called "CMS" "Tech" issues has to do with UTV's agreement with Trivone.
We all know Trivone is specialized in digital content services and focused on creating, editing, sourcing and packaging content.

I do not think this is a good way forward unless subu can improve on the quality of content. The quality of content on techtree.com is going from bad to worse. Their news, reviews, features, everything is going down the drain. Techtree might have a brand recall value but they have lost credibility over the years. This needs to be restored. Only a strong technical labs team who have detailed knowledge on products, product analysis and benchmarking will take techtree to another level like engadget. They simply dont have writers or reviewers who understand technology at all. Their reviews are merely specifications written in sentences instead of a table. Read up any review and you will notice that. Also all their reviews are MORE fanboy reviews rather than being objective and independent. Pick any apple product review and you will notice that. If L.Subramanayan has to take techtree to engadget level, the labs has to improve by leaps and bounds for sure.

You dont have to fight for space in an already messy space. So many startups are there. These brands are old and have some recall amongst industry people and PR. Less groundwork for mgmt. But the fail side is the premium attached to these brands - even tho they might not be making that much money.

The brand recall is an asset of UTV, none of it is Trivone's to claim. L Subramanayan doesn't get to own any assets or wealth, so I wonder what is in it for him. Anyway I see what you are saying, but the idea that this kind of business (outsourced content) is okay prevents India from producing a Businessinsider or an Engadget.

See the reason for this selling is that UTV is NOT able to make money on brands like Channeltimes.com amd techtree.com, CXOToday is the only Profit making brand. Plain and simple. UTV has tried various "OPTIONS" in the past. Changed management, changed processes, closed down brands, layoffs, hiring new MBA based managers and NONE of them have worked. This is just "another" trial. What good are brands if you cannot capitalise on them? UTV also has a business to run at the end of the day. They just keep pumping in money on techtree.com HOPING that they will make it big. Only GOOD content can save techtree. And maybe subbu can do that.

The problem with UTV is they forget that they are too used to the movie business model. The average UTV CEO/functional head has a little less than a year to turn things around. This outsourcing contract will be no different. It's good for Subu that he isn't joining these jokers as an employee.

I wonder if one can generate good content without ownership. How much will one stick their neck out for someone else's product. So more content writers, more ambivalent content that neither halps anyone nor harms anyone. In short, no journalism.

I agree. BI or Engadget will never happen in this country as long as there are people (mgmt) who want to eat most of the investors money in the form of fat salaries, not do much, want results in unreal timelines and destroy the product in the process. Who feels the effect are the bottom feeders because the 'top guns' jump ship as easily as frogs in a pond.
Secondly, not many in the media industry want to make a BI or engadget. they want to copy them so that they can make some money. It's more or less fly by night type of working.

I don't see how UTV Interactive can give CXOtoday and ChannelTimes to a third-party, when they are now part of UTV News. :oP
This is heights of outsourcing and a sign of ineptitude to do something with decade-old brands.

Fact of the matter is this - UTV CEO paid 15Cr for properties that were not worth that much. Even people in the industry without a finance background could have told him that. He was cheated brilliantly.
After realising the mess he got himself, he cant sell for two reasons - noone will pay that much and it looks bad in front of the investors.
Right now also, he has not found buyers to make up for the bleed. Best they could do is hire an 'agency' to do the dirty work they couldn't do.

Since they have done so many revamps and renaming, I think they should rename UTV Interactive to UTV Underactive.

You are right. ITN was in talks with CMP/UBM to sell the ITN brands earlier. After a due diligence they decided not to buy it as there was too much of legacy they were inheriting from a technical standpoint. Migrating ITN sites to new technology would have been an extremely costly affair. My guess is that the CEO in question knew little about online media and took over the brands without realizing what he was up to. Then he forgot that events are an essential component of any B2B media business if it were to be profitable and chopped off the events team. Later he figured out that he couldn't support the editorial team with online revenues alone. The current deal is good for the agency. But will the brands become profitable or even sustainable? I have my doubts. Ad realizations in the tech media industry in general are going down. Marketers are increasingly questioning the value provided by IT websites and magazines. The maximum ad revenues one can generate from consumer website like Techtree will never be enough to sustain a team of reviewers and writers ( forget about sales and support). Channel related ad and event spends are also coming down. That leaves them with CXOT which needs to do hell of a lot of work both online and offline before it can stand on its feet.

hahahahaha lol.. i think then they deserve to be kicked out.. all the investment on a site and you just let it go? I think UTV has shit loads of money to waste. i think they should not renew techtree, channeltimes and cxotoday as well. :D

Some interesting tidbits i managed to dig out. Is really interesting. Enterpriser was launched as a site that catered to the small business community. At first it was targeted to all small business readers and apparently it met very little success. Later it was restructured with a couple of people being hired and others being laid off. It met with a reasonable amount of success i am told. The guy who owns the domain now apparently was in-charge of the site. . [i see a conspiracy theory brewing up. Wonder how he ended up owning the domain]. The site was shut down for some reasons and the team disbanded. Some sources tell me he quit UTV after this incident. Makaan is it as simple as UTV forgot to renew the URL and he grabbed his opportunity? or is there some inside conspiracy? Drama out of a fiction novel. Did someone tip him on the inside that the site was not renewed or was it just co-incidence? Either he was waiting patiently to grab his opportunity or got tipped off or both, the sales team should be disappointed. Some sources reveal that the site had great sales potential. Sad that UTV had to let go of it in this way. All the money spent on branding, salaries to sustain the site, years of hard work down the GUTTER because of someone's foolishless or someone's act of opportunistic brilliance. Some sources say that the guy was a lazy dog while others say he was smart. Would love someone to comment.

Enterpriser.in started attracting traffic only after it was restructured into a site that started reviewing technology for small businesses. But the `visionary' CEO of UTV thought he would significantly increase CXOT's traffic if he moved the enterpriser content into that and buried what could have been a great opportunity to build a unique product. BTW, nobody spent a lot of money on the brand enterpriser. The original team of enterpriser was a set of poorly paid greenhorns who had no clue what they were up to.It's irrelevant whether somebody bought or grabbed the enterpriser domain. The point is UTV folks had no clue on how to build the products they bought from ITN

Your investigation is half-baked as is the work of most `hard working' journos nowadays. Analysis of this quality would have got you into trouble with your editor in the days I was a journalist. The person you are referring to as the `lazy guy' was the one of few clear-headed guys in the team. I know it for a fact because I hired him and managed him. Not only did he understand technology applicable to small businesses, he also tested and reviewed products relevant to the site's target audience. Enterpriser.in actually looked relevant for a few months. He produced measurable results and whoever is telling you he was lazy probably has a personal grouse against this guy or talking thru' his hat. The fact, as ghsnjy points out, is that UTV didn't care about the brand and tossed it down the gutter. So, how does it matter, if this guy or someone else `grabbed' the domain or whether UTV donated it? How is this guy going to regain the traffic he built two years ago considering that the site has been defunct for two years? How will it matter whether he calls that site enterpriser or muckraiser?